Yesterday was Shivaratri

Saturday, February 25th was Shivaratri, a Hindu celebration of Lord Shiva, god of destruction/creation. Actually, in India, everyone had celebrated the day before (due to time differences, of course). I went with two friends from Love of Ganesha out to San Ramon to be with the people of Amma's ashram for this auspicious occasion. We left at 5pm and got there at about 6:15pm. The festivities had not begun yet, fortunately. We missed the chanting of the 1,000 names of Amma, though. We did chant the 108 names of Amma and then heard a talk by one of her swamis about Shiva and his own personal relationship with Amma.
He recounted that when he first became a devotee of Amma he was accepted into one of India's most prestigious film schools. He said that over 500 people would apply every year and that only 20 would be chosen to attend the school each year. (I was really wondering what kinds of films he had made or what the criteria was for this film school, but he didn't get into that.) He was accepted and hoped that Amma would manifest a film camera for him. He approached her several times and got no answer. He then asked her what kind of seva (selfless service) he could do at the ashram. She wouldn't give him an answer. Finally she told him that his seva was to clean up the "cowshit." He had to milk the cows and feed them. He did this task for about a month when he decided that "Amma had not recognized (his) godliness, and therefore he wasn't going to do this seva anymore. He came outside later than usual, and he discovered that Amma was out there cleaning up the cowshit and caring for the cows. He felt really bad and related his experience to how Shiva helps destroy certain aspects of the ego to allow us to be something

Happy Birthday to Me.

It's not really my birthday. Actually, I thought it was still Saturday and the birthday of my former lover would have been happening. This is the guy I felt a strong karmic connection with. He drives me to write ungrammatically, so bear with me, please. The odd thing is that it's not only he who makes me feel uncomfortable but the other people I work with at Love of Ganesha also. Last night there was a birthday party for the owner. The owner doesn't like parties. She sat the whole time with her husband at a table away from everyone else. I had to sit at the same table as this ex-lover (the one from Nicaragua). It was a nightmare. He waved at me 5 seats away and didn't even call out my name as though he had forgotten it. I wasn't about to set up more bad karma, so I said hello. "How are you?" he said. I said, "Good, how are you." "Oh, very good." The compeition was on. I decided to give him a friendly/sarcastic thumbs up and said, "Good for you."

Actually, I'm too tired to think about this stupid stuff. I'm sick of getting treated badly by men. Only one has been recently half-way honest and kind. I'm not going to mention what a woman said at the party to get at me about this guy. Her story will fall under the category of "Why Civilization is so Uncivilized?" and the role women play in making men moe stupid and themselves more petty.

What's 'a mattah with Petah?

Has anyone watched and wondered at "The Family Guy?" It is too hilarious to the point of being sanely absurd. I'm wondering which character you most identify with:

Thanks for thinking about this. I'll reveal my secret character generator later.

(It was another difficult Monday to wake up to!!!!!)

The stomach speaks volumes and reports the news.

Tonight I went to my Psychic Horizons class on "Walking Your Path." We do about 4-5 meditations and then do healings on each other afterward. It is very strange that the person who healed me saw clawed hands groping continously outward from my third chakra. I did feel a little bit sick before I went over there (I had a headache). At this point in the evening I feel like my stomach is going to burst and my intestines will implode with the force of fifty-six balloons. Actually the pain is bad but not that bad. I hope it goes away.

My stomach has news to relate: there is debate going in in this household that Jeremy Hawkins' The Bride and Her Bachelor's Hot Air ( a novel of some innovation) is readable and therefore enjoyable. Has anyone read it and could you review it with me somehow--(via "comments" or whatever).

The nut is at the table.

Hello,
I'm writing this in letter form because it feels better this way. If you've read about my job in some of the other blogs, you'll know that I have a karmically, physically, emotionally and spiritually demanding job. I work with small children with huge disabilities. Five of them have autism, and the rest cerebral palsy. I have 3 assistants, all supposed adults.

One of the assistants is new. She has already put me down in front of the principal. Today I looked in one of the children's backpacks at the end of the day to discover that this assistant had told the others at the cafeteria table that she was not going to give this lunch that the parents had provided for the girl to her. This assistant claimed that the food was "too full of junk and sugar and she (the little six-year-old) shouldn't eat it.

Tomorrow I will tell the principal about this act of child abuse.

Broken Flowers and mended skirts.

Is it me or does Bill Murray in major dramatic roles sound like one of the most boring images one could think of? Tonight I am
spending most of the time writing on the computer because I rented the film "Broken Flowers" and I could only stand the first half of it until I am truly repulsed but able to keep the sound on. At this writing the Don Johnston character is meeting his son or something. The dialogue sounds unusually intimate.

Meanwhile there was a very beautiful but small shrine to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Love of Ganesha today. I asked them if they'd leave it up until Sunday so that I might read the written material they had on him.

It's been a week since I've blogged.

Accupuncture and Genocide

I asked my accupuncturist today, Dr. Xing Fu, if he could predict what the Year of the Dog will be like. He said, "Nice, like a dog. You like dogs?" "Yes," I said, another needle going into my leg. I had a wonderful dream while full of pins but can remember it. I know it didn't have anything to do with dogs.

Tonight my friend showed part of a video on "Utopia and Terrorism," The professor who did most of the lecturing spoke about the fact that this past century as well as this one have been the most violent in human history, killing masses of people in an attempt to create a kind of utopia out of some philosophical or religious conviction.

"Peace" is such nebulous word. Do we know what it really can mean?

The Year of the Dog

I'm wondering what the year of the Dog, 2006, will be like. Today at work our nurse in the classroom (one of our students has such violent seizures that a nurse must monitor her) took time off from her schedule to search for a dog on the web for the Year of the Dog. She came up with some very cool designs. If I had more computer skills and a scanner, I would have put the images on this blog. Ah, more technology!

Another friend of mine was telling me about an important person she, her husband, and a friend met on their trip to Death Valley. They met a woman named Marta Becket. She is still a popular entertainer at the age of 82. She has been in the theatre and tv industries since she was a child in New York City. Her theatre, which she painted murals all over, is located somewhere less than 100 miles outside of Las Vegas in the desert. I have yet to find out information about this woman on the net. It's time to think about sleep and work and all that. But I will put her in this blog some more. If you know about her or have met her, please share your experience.

First Day Back to Work

I'd been off since December 16th or something like that. Sleeping when I wanted to; getting up before or around 12pm. Doing all kinds of art and spiritual things, and enjoying friends and new friends. Suddenly, it was time, at some dark hour this morning, that I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep until the alarm went off. Tired. One of my roommates in the kitchen making popcorn at 7:20 in the morning in the kitchen. Stayed in the bathroom. Got to work a bit earlier than usual.

Work: keeping alert to all that happens with these young children with autism and cerebral palsy. Glad to see them in the early morning, glad to see them go in the afternoon. In the meantime trying to teach them how to use a schedule (PECs schedule), read a simple text, put puzzle pieces in place while singing "Old Mc Donald Had a Farm." Math and painting in the afternoon.

Tomorrow we'll have music.

Angela Davis is important.

Yesterday I was sitting in a funky little hair salon in my neighborhood. The hairdryer is right near the window, and people passing by and driving by can see right in. I didn't realize that my reading material, Angela Davis: An Autobiography would catch anyone's attention.

About twenty minutes into the dryer thing, and someone called the salon. "Angela Davis? There's no Angela Davis in here," said the hairstylist who answered the phone and was working alone in the salon. She then saw the book I was reading. We talked for a brief moment about what happened--10 minutes later. It took us that long to realize that Angela Davis is that significant of a person that someone would respond to watching someone else reading her book.

Shiva or Krishna?

The Vedanta Society of San Francisco came out today in the newspaper with some statement as to the Hindu belief that Jesus is
a kind of avatar like Shiva. Jesus's birth this year, and most years, is celebrated three days after the solstice, therefore on Saturnalia. Isn't Shiva associated with Saturn?

Rodney's Goodbye

This is Rodney Brown's swan song from Access San Francisco cable tv studios. I was the director, camera person and editor for this piece. Rodney has moved to Los Angeles and will be working with Spacetime Productions. Good luck, Rodney!


Thanks to my friends at Digital Etchings, for hosting the video.
2.6MB large - (Time: 4:24)

Now and Zen Mermaids and Guitars, Lovers and Love Energy

Now and Zen I just wrote a long, lengthy blog that got put on another website!!! Silly me, I haven't written a blog since July. There's too much to catch up on.

The blog had to do with playing an open mic tomorrow night. I played my guitar and tried to remember my old songs. The open mic will be at Sacred Grounds in the upper Haight opposite the Panhandle on Hayes Street. It is a place full of love energy. One cannot get enought Love Energy.

I'm on a cable access program on Love Energy called The Bro Jud on Love Energy show. I'm the "reader," and I often read from the techies' tome, The Rise of the Creative Class. I used to also read from Amma. I will again. The show is full of love and I think people will appreciate it.

Tomorrow I will also go to Love of Ganesha, a store in the Haight. I will meditate and talk with the people who work there who are from Thailand. They are beautiful spirits. Full of love energy.

About three weeks ago now I met a potential lover at Love of Ganesha. He is from Nicaragua and makes jewelry. There is a considerable difference in our ages. I really admire his sense of freedom, to think about going anywhere he wants. He lives at home with his parents and sometimes with girlfriends. He is a dread head but meditates very often at Love of Ganesha in which there is beautiful mediation room. Somehow I can't get him off my mind even though I went on a date with someone else two weeks ago and had a visit from an old lover who is going back to India last week.

Ah, the heart. It wanders. It ponders. I yearns.

Mermaids and Guitars plus Love Energy and Good-byes

I played my guitar tonight. The back is coming off of it. About 12 years ago I bought it for $90. from a French guy who had bought it in France. It's an Ibanez and therefore was probably made in Japan. I always had a problem with the high end being kind of gritty, but the guitar has been around a long while and has it's own unique sound like all guitars do. I was watching a Naveen Andrews interview on tv about six months ago, and he has a massive acoustic guitar collection. I'm sure real musicians do, too. My guitar collection consists of the Ibanez and and a Gretsch electric. My preference is to play electric, but to do open mics one has to use an acoustic guitar--for some reason!?

Tomorrow night I want to do an open mic at Sacred Grounds, a very love energy kind of place in the upper Haight on the Hayes Street side of the panhandle.

Love of Ganesha will be my stop before I go off to the open mic. Love of Ganesha is on Haight and Central and another store on Ashbury and Page. I love these two stores (how can one love a store??) and try to go to both as often as I can. There are meditation rooms in both stores.

I met someone through the Love of Ganesh store. He is from Nicaragua. He makes jewelry. Our relationship for that one evening and part of the next day was special to me in some way. Perhaps I admire his sense of freedom. He lives at home with his parents and doesn't have to worry about necessary bills. He doesn't even own a pair of shoes that he bought to fit him! He has dreadlocks and considers himself part of the young hippie love scene.

The show Bro Jud on Love Energy is a cable access one that I am on once a month. I've been with the show for 5 years. We are always considering different methods and modes and ways of speaking about love energy. I must have something in common with my young lover and therefore we were brought together. He called me "La Sirena." It is a quandary to me why mermaids are often depicted alone. Can anyone help me with the details of the myths about mermaids? (I'd like to make a song of it.)

I'm so glad to be blogging again!

My cat died.

Monday of last week I took my cat Lita to the veterinarian to be put to sleep. She weighed three pounds. She was nearly seventeen-years-old. Her eyes were half-open and she appeared to have lost her sight. Lita walked up the back steps and slept that morning on the bed of one of my housemates. She slept in parallel fashion with her companion kitten, Arlo, a black punk cat with green globes for eyes and almost 8 years-old.

By mid-afternoon Lita walked over to her water bowl and smelled it. She could not drink.

My housemates and I discussed whether she should be put to sleep or whether she would have more dignity dying at home--however long that would take and however much she might be suffering meanwhile. My decision had already been made: take her from her suffering. We reached the emergency hours for the veterinary specialists at 6:00 pm. I had decided to start reading The Upanishads. I couldn't see around me, although I was petting her while we waited.

When the vet saw her, he asked if she'd been eating at all. For the past week or more, she had started to end eating. He explained that she was utterly dehydrated. He compared her experience to one of his own when he was mountain climbing or something. He said he had had the same level of dehydration as Lita and that he had been in great physical pain. He also mentioned that he wished that people who have incurable diseases and are suffering immensely should be allowed to end their suffering. Euthanasia can save lives.

Forgot what I was trying to say...

It's red and velvety. It's a book. It's my "scribbling pad" and it is always near my bed. The writings are all from summer of 1999. There's a passage that I can't comprehend. I mean, I have no idea what I'm trying to say. Help me out!

"Don't you want to cry?" asked Patsy. She had just been made aware of her friend's recent miseries.

"What do you mean 'want to'? Sandra let out with a vehemence bordering on psychotic, episodic, (psychic?) meandering.

" I suppose I should have said, 'will you?' or 'can you'--or maybe I should just have remained silent. "You just said that no one cares about you."

"That's perfect." Gratuitous responses to what is obviously beyond anyone's control. "If I could cry, I would."

Her shoulder-length brownish hair was speckled with white. It was, at least, clean.

"I've got to go now," announced Patsy, as she tossed back her orange-cascading locks. "I just remembered I have to pick up the child. Take care, ok,?"

Patsy's tight black pants betrayed a certain need for sex, but her preppie, forest-green shirt told most of America that, in a pinch, she would be on their side.

Sandra...thought about the spirit that had inhabited her while she was pregnant years ago. She wondered if it ever made it to its desired home. Maybe it was living in one of Patsy's kids. "That thing spends too much time berating Man for whatever reason." Sandra told herself that it was time--now or never--to give birth to a similar ghoul or otherwise unsavory spirit. "I have absolutely nothing to hold on to, she thought. "And that's why women love to parade their newborns around the street of the city, allowing them to suck in all that carbon monoxide from busy drivers and then take them home to suckle off the teat of a Mama lamb who just grazed on some MSG-filled potato chips from the local corner store. That's what I need."

Bro Jud on Love Energy

Now and ZenBack in March I wrote about being a guest on the Bro Jud on Love Energy show on cable tv 29 here in San Francisco. I forgot to mention that I had worked all day, driven across town for an acupuncture treatment and wasted time away from home (a place called Bernal Heights) until I could be on the show where everyone arrive before 8:30 but videotaping doesn't begin until almost 10 pm. I have seen the dvd of the March show. I didn't realize that three large red pimple-ish areas on the right side of my nose/cheek were highly visible and that the person who was directing had my chair face the direction away from the camera almost at a profile angle so that my blotches could not be seen unless I turned my head 45 degrees to face the camera. I was thinner then, and I had my hair in pig tails and I didn't have bangs like I have now. Needless to say, I didn't bother to look in the mirror before the show and no one told me or commented on my blotchey face.

Tonight, before taping, Jud was combing his hoary beard and shoulder-length hair. He was wearing a black long-sleeved t-shirt. As he was combing, little bits of whitish bits of bits were falling on his shirt. No one told him his dandruff had completely covered his shirt. Because I wished someone had told me about my inattention to my appearance, I helped Jud swish the stuff off. Jud said, "There's always something, isn't there?" I could immediately ruminate on all my bodily flaws from too-thick hair to my un-sexy black socks with a black skirt. Yes, there's always something, I had to agree.

Then I thought about the fact that I'm supposed to be reading something about love energy on this show. People are supposed to be listening to what I read. Lately I've been reading Jud's writing, which, although not "bad," is sometimes murky and takes alot of smiling to carry off well. The director told me tonight that the special effects behind my head looked really good because I wasn't sitting right in the middle of the shot but was off to the side. I said that people have to have something visually interesting to look at since following the material that is read is sometimes a chore.

I used to read from books like The Creative Class and some of Amma's writings as well as poetry. I preferred stringing texts together so that the listener could concentrate on one or more of them and try to piece them together in their minds. But as time has gone on, the show has become, in Jud's head, a classroom or something. He goes off on tangents alot more and is less clear about what he's saying or who his audience is. However, people used to say, "What's this guy talking about? He's full of hot air."

Jud is over 83 years-old. He says he's losing his short-term memory. I have noticed this a little bit, but he is still able to get a 10-person crew together to do the show every month. And he has a "think tank" every Thursday to go over his ideas and to brainstorm. I haven't even mentioned his plan: to end poverty, to provide education to those who are unable to attend public schools due to many reasons, to help single mothers, veterans, people suffering from AIDS and people with physical and mental disabilities.

More on this later...

Now and ZenRemember when I wrote that I had a job working with small children with other abilities? It's hard to believe that I made it through the school year.

Last summer I underwent a severe depression in which I lost 25+ pounds and became anemic. I returned to the job with no energy. The kids were all new kindergarteners with autism, tantrums, screaming for hours, hitting, biting, pinching, hitting themselves with their heads on the floor. You had to be there.

And then at night I had to get up about four to five times to go to the bathroom. I was getting no sleep and working with these children.

By springtime I was sleeping better and beginning to understand the children a little better. And now that the semester is over until the end of August, I'm not really that tired.

There should be a lot to do. The hedonist in me wants to just play, play, play. The creative spirit wants to make music. The spiritual part of me wants to read uplifting books and do seva.

Anyone who has time off this summer and wants to go on a trip--write to me.

Facepainting and facelifting--not weight lifting.

Now and Zen: Sick and tired of being sick and tired--and anonymous.Today I performed the well-renowned art of facepainting at the educational institution at which I slave. The children were very vulnerable and cute, and at times I thought of myself as a make up artist, concentrating with Gaugin flair on the canvas. It was when I had to render a dinosaur on the cheek of a five-year-old that things got rough. Put those spikey humps in the right place, and all is well.

This week I demonstrated with 1499 of my cohorts in San Francisco Unified School District on Van Ness and Mc Allister. We all wore our blue white and red T-shirts and carried signs. My sign was actually written and conceived by another teacher but she gave it to me to embellish. It read "Give him back to Hollywood" and I added "better yet: Austria." They put my picture on the www.uesf.org (see below) as one of the demonstrators. I don't want to get into the socio-political suggestions in the sign right now because I really want to talk about superficial things like age and how people look. But I suppose how people look has something to do with the sign. If one is a white European, the idea of being deported for any reason is less likely than for people of different skin tones and from different places than Europe (and I'm not talking about Canada!).

Actually, I wanted to talk about age and superficiality and faces and facelifts and all that. A friend of mine today told me that I used to be one of her "young friends." Now that I'm "older," that is, can't pass for being twenty-five, I'm no longer "young." My friend just turned 60 a couple of months ago. I wonder how I would feel were I 60 right this moment. Would I feel even further away from 25? Probably. Would I need to get a facelift to become a 25-year-old? Probably. I have friends who are in their fifties who have had lifts. (I'm not fifty, and who cares, anyway).

Parrots and Love.

Now and Zen: Rubens, or the Michelin people.Tonight I saw the film "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill." This is the first movie I've ever wanted to buy. My friend Dave and my housemate came along for this one. My housemate had to see "a film that starts and ends with parrots." And, at first while watching the film, I started to wonder whether this film could be carried by the parrots.

Then the stories of the parrots themselves became so awe-inspiring. I've already forgotten the name of the man who was feeding and befriending the birds. But he gave many of them names and told stories about their habits and wants and dislikes. He romantically recounted the relationships between the birds and the fact that there existed among them a blue-headed bird who never had a mate. This bird's name was Connor. So cute!

Ultimately the experience of this film is once again like many philosophizing screeenings: we are one. There is no coincidence in this. Yet there is. When we see that we are all one and really believe it, we will treat each other as though we were hugging ourselves.